Page 1 of Lies He Told Me (Bratva Crime Syndicate 1)

Prologue

Joy

This is not a Cinderella story.

There’s too much blood for that. Too much darkness, too much pain.

And way too many lies.

That’s how it started—with a lie. Gavril told me he’d protect me. Swore he’d keep me safe from everyone who wanted to hurt me.

He was so, so wrong.

I shouldn’t have listened. The people out in the city, the monsters crawling in the night… those weren’t the ones I had to worry about.

Because in the end, the biggest threat of all…

Came from my fake husband himself.

He comes in my room without a knock. Closes the door behind him.

The chains around my bare arms are cold and tight. I can’t seem to peel my gaze off him, off his bloodstained sleeves, his hungry eyes.

He steps forward, grabs my chain and tugs it so that I’m thrown against him. “Don’t pretend you don’t want this,” he growls.

His overpowering musk fills my nostrils. All I can hear and feel is the twist of our bodies slamming together, his hands ripping all over me, pulling down my pants and panties.

Then he stops short. I look up at him with desperate eyes. “I thought you were here to free me.”

He laughs cruelly. “Who said that?” He steps close again and strokes my cheek with the back of his hand. “I’m only here to reclaim what’s mine.”

He undoes his pants, then yanks me by the chain back to him. Just like that, he’s inside me, owning me.

His one hand is around my neck, the other on my chain, pulling me to him, shoving himself inside me, harder and deeper and faster, until I’m just about screaming with it, shaking with it, and just as I’m about to lose it—

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s where the story ends. To see how we got there, we have to start much, much earlier.

Gavril

Months Earlier

How did it come to this?

My eyes skip across the crowd of familiar faces. My men. My Bratva. All of us gathered here for what must come next.

The air is stale with foreboding. We sit on the stone seats; the accused man sits on the ornate red chair. A red chair for a red council. Red for blood that will soon be spilled.

The man sprawled in the chair at the center of the circle is smirking like this is all amusing to him. He is a killer of civilians, a breaker of the rules that protect us from the city and the city from us.

He’s also my brother.

Looking at Osip, I can almost forget that fact of our relationship. If I catch him in just the right light, I can see the traces of the innocent boy I once knew. The one who, back in the day, got us into movie theaters without paying—I swear, miss, I had our tickets just a minute ago.

Years later, when the stakes were much higher than a free matinee, that innocence got us deals we shouldn’t have been able to make. “You have my word,” he would say, and he meant it back then. I knew it; he knew it; the men we were dealing with knew it.

They did not know back then what we would become—powerful. Unstoppable. Ruthless.

But then again, who could have looked at Osip in those years and known that? Those wide brown eyes, that oval face with glossy brown hair falling carelessly to his shoulders.

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